Another of our regularly scheduled observing nights last night, and we had a few people show up. On the refractor, we had Dale Hall, looking for the Whirpool Galaxy and finding it totally "underwhelming". I took a peek at it through his 5" and it was nearly as good as it was in my 12.5 f/7. But, that was still a little early in the evening, about 10:00pm. By 10:30, it was showing some hint of spiral structure in my old Redshift. The Ring Nebula and Hercules Cluster at 198X were great, though. The Ring was easily about 1/2 the size of my field of view in that 12.5mm Plossl, and the Globular almost filled the entire field of view. Excellent!!!
We also had Ron Medley on the Meade 10" LX50, using his Magellan handpad and software with his laptop for some 21st Century high-tech tracking. We looked at M81 and M82 with it and were quite happy with the views. The cooler temperatures after Friday's passage of a cold front were SOOO welcome. It was almost like observing on a late September or early October evening rather than a July 22nd evening.
We also had some visitors from the Fayetteville-Rogers area who had seen our Award-Winning web site and had printed off a map to come and find Coleman Observatory on their own. I didn't get to visit with them as much as I would have liked, and if they will click on my name somewhere on the site, or just send an email to caretaker@aoas.org, I'd like to chat with them some more. I usually give visitors some freebies like a "Welcome to Astronomy" booklet from Astronomy magazine, some book markers from NASA/JPL and some other things, but unfortunately they left before I could think to do this. If you folks will zap me a note, we'll find a way to get some of these things to you.
All-in-all, it was another good night. The views were not spectacular, except for the fact that we weren't wiping sweat from our foreheads every two minutes like we have been in this miserable heat-wave recently, but we could see pretty good details in most of the objects we tracked down. I wish the weather would remain that way for the entire week, but it's not supposed to last very long. Oh, well!
Bob
Coleman Observatory